In another moment both boats are in the Gut, and Miller, motionless as a
statue till now, calls out, "Give it her, boys! Six strokes, and we are
into them!" Old Jervis lashes his oar through the water, the boat
answers to the spurt, and Tom feels a little shock, and hears a grating
sound, as Miller shouts, "Unship oars, bow and three." The nose of the
St. Ambrose boat glides quietly up the side of the Exeter, the first
bump has been made.
Two more bumps were made on the next two nights, and bets were laid
freely that St. Ambrose would bump Oriel and become head of the river.
But the Oriel crew were mostly old oars, seasoned in many a race, and
one or two in the St. Ambrose boat were getting "stale."
Something had to be done, and when Drysdale--a
gentleman-commoner--resenting Miller's strictures on his performance at
No. 2, declined to row any more, Tom suggested that Hardy would row if
he were asked.
Hardy, shy and proud because of his poverty, was little known in St.
Ambrose; but a fast friendship had grown up between him and Tom Brown,
and he was glad enough to come into the boat at the captain's request.
The change in the boat made all the difference. Hardy was out sculling
every day on the river, and was consequently in good training. He was,
besides, a man of long, muscular arms.
It was a great race. Inch by inch St. Ambrose gained on Oriel, creeping
up slowly but surely, but the bump was not made till both boats were
close on the winning-post. So near a shave was it! As for the scene on
the bank, it was a hurly-burly of delirious joy.
St. Ambrose was head of the river!
_III.--A Crisis_
There was a certain inn, called the Choughs, where the St. Ambrose men
were in the habit of calling for ale on their way back from the river;
and it had become the correct thing for Ambrosians to make much of Miss
Patty, the landlady's niece. Considering the circumstances, it was a
wonder Patty was not more spoilt than was the case. As it was, Hardy had
to admit that the girl held her own well, without doing or saying
anything unbecoming a modest woman. But he was convinced that Tom was in
her toils, and after pondering what he ought to do, decided to speak
plainly.
Tom had gone into Hardy's rooms according to his custom, after hall; and
Hardy at once opened fire concerning the Choughs.
"Brown, you've no right to go to that place," he said abruptly.
"Why?" said Tom.
"You know why," said Hardy.
"Why am I not to go to the Choughs? Because there happens to be a pretty
barmaid there? All our crew go, and twenty other men besides."
"Yes; but do any of them go in the sort of way you do? Does she look at
any one of them as she does at you?"
"You seem to know a great deal about it," said Tom. "How should I know?"
"That's not fair or true, or like you, Brown," said Hardy. "You do know
that that girl doesn't care a straw for the other men who go there. You
do know that she is beginning to care for you. I've taken it on myself
to speak to you about this, and I shouldn't be your friend if I shirked
it. You shan't go on with this folly, this sin, for want of warning."
"So it seems," said Tom doggedly. "Now I think I've had warning enough.
Suppose we drop the subject?"
"Not yet," said Hardy firmly. "There are only two endings to this sort
of business, and you know it as well as I."
"A right and a wrong one--eh? And because I'm your friend, you assume
that my end will be the wrong one?"
"I say the end _must_ be the wrong one here! There's no right end. Think
of your family. You dare not tell me that you will marry her!"
"I _dare_ not tell you!" said Tom, starting up. "I dare tell any man
anything I please!"
"I say again," went on Hardy, "you _dare_ not say you mean to marry her!
You don't mean it! And, as you don't, to kiss her in the passage as you
did tonight----"
"So you were sneaking behind to watch me?" burst out Tom.
Hardy only answered calmly and slowly, "I will not take these words from
any man! You had better leave my rooms!"
The next minute Tom was in the passage; the next striding up and down
the side of the inner quadrangle in the peace of the pale moonlight.
The following day, and for many days, neither Hardy nor Tom spoke to one
another. Both were wretched, and both feared lest others should notice
the quarrel.
Tom went more and more to the Choughs, and Patty noticed a change in the
youth--a change that half-fascinated and half-repelled her.
Then, for the next few days, Tom plunged deeper and deeper downwards. He
left off pulling on the river, shunned his old friends, and lived with a
set of men who were ready enough to let him share all their brutal
orgies.
Drysdale, with whom Tom had been on good terms, noted the difference,
and advised him "to cut the Choughs business."
"You're not the sort of a fellow to go in for this kind of thing," he
said. "I'll be hanged if it won't kill you, or make a devil of you
before long! Make up your mind to cut the whole concern, old fellow!"
"I'm awfully wretched, Drysdale," was all Tom could say.
All the same, Tom could not follow Drysdale's advice at once and break
off his visits to the Choughs altogether.
The real crisis was over. He had managed to pass through the eye of the
storm, and was drifting into the skirts of it, conscious of an escape
from utter shipwreck.
His visits to the Choughs became shorter; he never stayed behind now
after the other men, and avoided interviews with Patty alone as
diligently as he had sought them before.
Patty, unable to account for this fresh change of manner, was piqued,
and ready to revenge herself in a hundred little ways. If she had been
really in love with him it would have been a different matter; but she
was not. In the last six weeks she certainly had often had visions of
the pleasures of being a lady and keeping servants, but her liking was
not more than skin deep.
Of late, indeed, she had been much more frightened than attracted by the
conduct of her admirer, and really felt it a relief, notwithstanding her
pique, when he retired into a less demonstrative state.
Before the end of that summer term Tom had it made up with Hardy, and it
was Hardy who, at Tom's request, called in at the Choughs, just to see
how things were going on. Tom saw at a glance that something had
happened when Hardy appeared again.
"What is it? She is not ill?" he said quickly.
"No; quite well, her aunt says."
"You didn't see her, then?"
"No the fact is, she has gone home."
_IV.--The Master's Term_
The years speed by, bringing their changes to St. Ambrose. Hardy is a
fellow and tutor of the college in Tom's second year, and Drysdale has
been requested to remove his name from the books. Tom is all for
politics now, and the theories he propounds in the Union gain him the
name of Chartist Brown.
In his third year, Hardy often brought him down from high talk of
"universal democracy" and "the good cause" by insisting on making the
younger man explain what he really meant. And though Tom suffered under
this severe treatment, in the end he generally came round to acknowledge
the reasonableness of Hardy's methods of argument.
It was a trying year to Tom, this third and last year; full of large
dreams and small performances, of hopes and struggles, ending in failure
and disappointment. The common pursuits of the place had lost their
freshness, and with it much of their charm. He was beginning to feel
himself in a cage, and to beat against the bars of it.
Squire Brown was passing through Oxford, and paid his son a visit in the
last term.
Tom gave a small wine-party, which went off admirably, and the squire
enlarged upon the great improvement in young men and habits of the
university, especially in the matter of drinking. Tom had only opened
three bottles of port. In his time the men would have drunk certainly
not less than a bottle a man.
But as the squire walked back to his hotel he was deeply moved at the
Radical views his son now held. He could not understand these new
notions of young men, and thought them mischievous and bad. At the same
time, he was too fair a man to try to dragoon his son out of anything
which he really believed. The fact had begun to dawn on the squire that
the world had changed a good deal since his time; while Tom, on his
part, valued his father's confidence and love above his own opinions. By
degrees the honest beliefs of father and son no longer looked monstrous
to one another, and the views of each of them were modified.
* * * * *
One more look must be taken at the old college. Our hero is up in the
summer term, keeping his three weeks' residence, the necessary
preliminary to an M.A. degree. We find him sitting in Hardy's rooms; tea
is over, scouts out of college, candles lighted, and silence reigning,
except when distant sounds of mirth come from some undergraduates' rooms
on the opposite side of the quad.
"Why can't you give a fellow his degree quietly," says Tom, "without
making him come and kick his heels here for three weeks?"
"You ungrateful dog! Do you mean to say you haven't enjoyed coming back,
and sitting in dignity in the bachelors' seats in chapel and at the
bachelors' table in hall, and thinking how much wiser you are than the
undergraduates? Besides your old friends want to see you, and you ought
to want to see them."
"Well, I'm very glad to see you again, old fellow. But who else is there
I care to see? My old friends are gone, and the youngsters look on me as
a sort of don, and I don't appreciate the dignity. You have never broken
with the place. And then you always did your duty, and have done the
college credit. You can't enter into the feelings of a fellow who wasted
three parts of his time here."
"Come, come, Tom! You might have read more, certainly, and taken a
higher degree. But, after all, I believe your melancholy comes from your
not being asked to pull in the boat."
"Perhaps it does. Don't you call it degrading to be pulling in the
torpid in one's old age?"
"Mortified vanity! It's a capital boat. I wonder how we should have
liked to have been turned out for some bachelor just because he had
pulled a good oar in his day?"
"Not at all. I don't blame the youngsters. By the way, they're an
uncommonly nice set. Much better behaved in every way than we were. Why,
the college is a different place altogether. And as you are the only new
tutor, it must have been your doing. Now I want to know your secret?"
"I've no secret, except taking a real interest in all that the men do,
and living with them as much as I can. You may guess it isn't much of a
trial to me to steer the boat down, or run on the bank and coach the
crew. And now the president of St. Ambrose himself comes out to see the
boat. But I don't mean to stop up more than another year now at the
outside. I have been tutor nearly three years, and that's about long
enough."
The talk went on until the clock struck twelve.
"Hallo!" said Tom. "Time for me to knock out, or the old porter will be
in bed. Good-night!"
"Good-night!"
* * * * *